Both at home and in the office, we all have a great deal of information that needs organising. From contacts to appointments, EssentialPIM is a powerful personal information manager that makes it easy to keep on top of an ever-growing amount of information. The ability to store all of your email, addresses, lists and notes in one place makes the program a one stop shop for your organisational needs.

Thing is, you can’t always lug your computer around with you, so – perhaps mindful of this – Astonsoft has developed mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. The Android version lets you access – and update – your contacts, notes, calendar, to-do list and passwords, with contacts being synchronized with the native app on your mobile.

In almost every way, the Android app is superior to its iOS counterpart: the interface is better developed, and closely resembles the desktop version to boost familiarity using it. Sadly, despite an ever-growing list of supported cloud providers, syncing quickly and seamlessly via the cloud requires you purchase EssentialPIM Pro 5.5; free users are left with the slightly clunky PC sync version – it’s wireless, but a little fiddly to set up and only works when EssentialPIM is running on your PC.

As apps goes, it does the job, which is critical. It’s a shame the screen is only formatted for mobiles, but problems syncing data appear to have been resolved on the whole, so long as you update the desktop version to 5.x.

What's new in EssentialPIM for Android 3.5?

- Contacts
- Ability to show to dos in calendar*
- Ability to set start and due times for to dos (not just dates)
- New start screen, icon and other UI improvements throughout the app
- Widgets for Android 2.x*
- Better and faster scrolling in passwords
- Numerous bug fixes and improvements since last version

Verdict:

A good first stab at extending EssentialPIM support to the mobile platform, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

8.48 brings:
- Optimized grass rendering and procedural foliage system preview
- Plugins available in Marketplace
- Improved accuracy for motion blur
- New Tone Mapper
- Support for all the latest VR hardware including Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Steam VR and HTC Vive, Leap Motion, and Sony's Project Morpheus for PlayStation 4
- "Scrubbable" network replays with rewind support and live time scrubbing
- Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI